The Most Boring Day in History

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — Even the slowest news day won’t compare with April 11, 1954. That day was the most boring 24 hours of the twentieth century, at least according to one British computer programmer.

William Tunstall-Pedoe built a program called True Knowledge that lets users look up important events that happened on any particular day of the past century. Pedoe used this tool to analyze significant world events since the beginning of the 1900s to determine the least eventful day of them all. The result was one spring day more than 50 years ago.

“Nobody significant died that day, no major events apparently occurred and although a typical day in the 20th century has many notable people being born, for some reason that day had only one person that might make that claim: Abdullah Atalar - a Turkish academic,” Pedoe wrote on his website.

Pedoe’s site claims to have compiled more than 300 million facts, and data are continually being added. But there’s no doubt that some will debate whether this tool really factors in everything that happened on a given day, and perhaps more importantly, some might question the definition of a major event.

That said, April 11, 1954 is so uneventful that even after we spent a significant amount of time searching online, we could not find even a silly event that took place that day to mention jokingly. But the next day, April 12, stuff really happened: Dwight Griswold, who served as a senator and governor in Nebraska, passed away that day, and Dave Hanson, a hockey player and sometime actor, was born. Take that, April 11!

However, as Pedoe notes on his site, he may have inadvertently undermined his own findings.

“The irony is though, that having done the calculation, the day is now interesting for being exceptionally boring!” he said. “Perhaps we need to calculate the second most boring day...”